Kim Kardashian West has always wanted a big family.

The media personality and entrepreneur, who has four children with her husband Kanye West, has always been open about her “wild” experience of raising North, Saint, Chicago and Psalm.

But the 39-year-old’s journey to motherhood hasn’t been easy.

Although Kim delivered her first two children, six-year-old daughter North and four-year-old son Saint, the reality star used a surrogate to deliver her youngest children, one-year-old daughter Chicago and seven-month-old son Psalm, after enduring life-threatening complications.

In 2018, Kim Kardashian’s surrogate appeared on Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Post continues below.

In a new video for her SKIMS Solutionwear line, Kim opened up about the many complications she had while pregnant with North and Saint.

“When I was pregnant with my daughter North, I had a condition called pre-eclampsia or toxemia, which is basically when the mum’s organs start to shut down,” Kim explained in the video.

“The only way to get rid of that, is to deliver the baby. At 34 and a half weeks I had to into emergency labour, they induced me,” Kim said, adding that North was just 1.8 kilograms when she was born six weeks early in 2013.

Preeclampsia is a condition which causes high blood pressure, which can damage the liver and the kidneys. The condition usually arises around 20 weeks into the pregnancy.

After delivering North, Kim then suffered from placenta accreta, which occurs when the placenta remains attached to the uterine wall after childbirth, risking high blood loss.

“After I delivered [North], my placenta never came out. My placenta grew inside my uterus and that is what women die from in child birth,” Kim explained.

You can watch Kim Kardashian’s full interview on her pregnancy complications below. Post continues after video.

Despite the traumatic pregnancy and delivery, the KKW Beauty founder began the process of freezing her eggs.

“I was able to get pregnant through that, with my son Saint. I had the same condition and the same awful delivery that I had with my first daughter,” Kim said.

“After that, I actually had to have five different operations within a year and a half to fix the damage that all of that did from the inside,” she added.

“But on the outside, I was still filming and doing photoshoots.”

Despite the pain she went through, Kim was hoping to fall pregnant again. In the end, however, the mother-of-four used a gestational carrier to deliver both Chicago, who was born in January 2018 and Psalm, who was born in May 2019.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Kim Kardashian West (@kimkardashian) on Dec 6, 2019 at 7:16am PST

“I asked my doctors, ‘Can I do it one more time?’ and they were like, ‘We won’t even put an embryo in you, that would be like malpractice,'” Kim recalled.

“I opted to have two different surrogates to use the last two embryos that we had,” she added.

“I am just so thankful for my beautiful kids. You know, no matter how they came to me, they came to me. I’m so thankful for surrogates. I would have gone through the same pain, you know, and back for the result of having my babies – it was all worth it.”

It’s not the first time Kim has opened up about the difficulties she endured while giving birth to North and Saint.

In a post shared to her website after the birth of North in 2013, Kim described the traumatic experience of suffering from placenta accreta.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Kim Kardashian West (@kimkardashian) on Nov 28, 2019 at 11:37am PST

“My doctor had to stick his entire arm in me and detach the placenta with his hand, scraping it away from my uterus with his fingernails,” she wrote at the time.

“My mum was crying; she had never seen anything like this before. My delivery was fairly easy, but then going through that – it was the most  painful experience of my life.”

Speaking to People in May last year, Kim shared that she has found the surrogacy process rewarding.

“I really, really enjoyed the surrogacy process. I will say, when it came to the breastfeeding time, I was like, ‘Okay, this is the best decision I ever made’,” she said.

“It’s a game changer, having to not go through [nursing] every few hours. I can spend so much more time with the older kids and getting them used to the baby.”

Feature Image: Instagram/@kimkardashian

For more on this topic:

• A Christmas card and a mystery love bite: Everything we know about the Kardashians’ feud.
• ‘My dress had nipples on it. Kanye wanted them taken off’. 3 things we learnt from Kim Kardashian’s The Project interview.
• Keeping Up With The Kardashians first aired 12 years ago. Here’s how much they’ve changed.
• “My hands are numb.” Kim Kardashian shares health scare on the season return on KUWTK.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter For Humans With Kids, where Holly Wainwright shares her parenting nails and fails, and stories from the glorious mess that is family life.